Tag: Africa

Shore this!

It’s not good enough with automation.

They need to combine that with outsourcing, off-shoring, in-shoring and now, near-shoring.  The idea is to line up the  Filippino call-center workers at mid-night (to go to work, not in line for next-day Black Friday sales) to make a go at scripted greetings like “Have I done everything to your satisfaction”.

Now Google wants to be unique: back to using the shop down the street so Googlers don’t have to fly to China.

Meanwhile, Africa is buying in to the Chinese Dream.

What happened to California Dreaming? To the Mamas and the Papas.

Aren’t all the leaves brown any more?

(I definitely need to “walk into a church, and sit down and pray”).

Industrial might. Pressures of automation and legislation.

If one can get the right mix of technology prowess, regulatory compliance  and market demand, he/she  rules.  The kids are playing with the I-pads instead of cabbage dolls.

All the powers to them.

More information, hopefully leads to smarter and more compliant kids.

Not so sure on that last point!

When honeymoon is over for off-shoring, and inflation takes its toll in wage-pressured China, we will see a sad wave of unemployment and unrest there.

Of course, they can then “sub-shore” to Africa, to be evangelists of the new Chinese Dream.

Sort of Chinese Peace Corps. Know-how in exchange for rare earth. Fair trade.

Trinh Cong Son (Vietnamese Bob Dylan) had a line “Why travel to and fro so much, to tire your life out”.

The thing about companies and market is that they often don’t know what they want. A few years back,  focus groups said they wouldn’t buy a notebook (today’s I-pad). Go figure!

Mobile books

I was waiting for my scooter ride outside Cho Ray Hospital when a peddler approached me. “Want to pick something to read?”. Turned out, she was selling used books, in a box: Cu Chi Tunnel, My Lai Massacre, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Sorrows of War, Understanding Vietnam…

Those subjects are now as old as the war itself. All healed and pealed, just scars.

When I was in high school, I went up the gang-plank to tour the Logos ship.

This ship carried books and Bibles across the ocean to far-away lands (of heathen). Later, to reciprocate, I volunteered one summer aboard the Doulos (Logos 2.0) ship to W  Africa.  I saw the longing for a better life in those dark eyes. The instant bonding of men in different skin colors. And the no-way-out trajectory of Liberia in the mid-80’s.

Mobile books.

But not up-ward mobile lives.

Now, we have e-books and e-learning.

Open U and open source. I wonder how many of us are taking advantage of free access to advance ourselves.

I wonder how many sales the peddler made yesterday outside the hospital?

I wonder how many patients bought and read about Man’s Fate .

I read so I won’t be alone.

I am reading “Love and Garbage”.

And I appreciate your reading this, so you and I are not alone.

Love, death and garbage will always be with us. It’s an unmovable law. The consolation is, we are not alone in this. Want to pick something to read?

Blind in wilderness

Years ago, I took a course in Wilderness Survival.

One of the classmates was a blind Korean guy.  The others all white males.

We were to spend the entire five days in the White Mountain of New Hampshire,

with one solo day. Our “final” was rock repelling.

I kept looking in my teammate’s eyes and wondered how in the world he could survive the course, its obstacles and the rest of his life in urban jungle.

To make a long story short. We all passed eventually, but not without a hitch.

That hitch happened to be me. I repelled down straying from everyone else’s path (of least resistance). My instructor leaned down and gave me personal feedback while I was dangling in mid-air.  This wasn’t  my first time. Later, at an MCI white-water rafting trip, I got bumped out of the inflated raft into the gushing icy-cold Colorado waters. Luckily, my teammates circled the raft and pulled me back in.

Every once in a while, when facing seemingly insurmountable  challenges, I tap into that dormant strength to overcome fear. We all learned about our inner strength from that course, including our blind teammate who said “I see” a lot.

He was an inspiration to us all (at least, he wasn’t afraid of the pitch-dark solo).

People without sight, without limp remind us that fear is an emotion to co-exist with hope.

The fear of losing face is big in societies like Vietnam‘s.

Here it is common that a company employs mostly relatives.

Or vice versa, long-time employees are regarded as families.

Your identity is that of so and so’s cousin, aunt, uncle or nephew.

The  relationship web got more entangled when your ancestors had multiple marriages. Vietnamese language has precise naming for older/younger brothers and sisters (Anh/Em).

And to be on the safe side, just address everyone as if he/she were older.

What does this have to do with wilderness survival?

I am reentering a society built on collective identity.

My atomized self needs some attitude adjustment.

Instinctively, I weighed the way I address people, reading their non-verbal responses.

To survive here, I have to flash back to that “solo”night in the mountain, without light and without human interaction. Just inner noise and inner voice.

In Vietnam, self-mastery is hailed as a core virtue and a corner-stone for leadership (Tu Than, Te Gia, Bnh Quoc, Tri Thien Ha). Super-imposing this on Western leaders today (for instance my Penn State Defense Coach, who decided to go on the offense with young boys), we probably can narrow the field quite a bit.

Every culture has its gem. But if one is blind, it doesn’t matter  wilderness or waterfront, one still can’t see.

I know one thing from that wilderness survival class: my Korean teammate did not judge me by sight e.g the color of my skin or any other outward factors.

Sand bag Body bag

A Thai monk needs to lay more sandbags to stem the flow of water, while Libyan fighters can now lay down their guns since the Colonel was finally in the bag, body bag.

One country exports rice, the other oil.

Back in 1997, Thailand’s rising real estate bubble nearly took down neighboring Asian Tigers with it. This time, its rising waters will surely drive up the price of rice.  No one can yet predict oil price in light of the latest development in Libya.  But oil consortium already committed to the tune of $100 Billion to modernize Iraqi facilities.

While monks in Thailand have always taken up a still posture, young fighters were on their Westward move, hanging  tight to guns on wheel.

Hot sand in the desert versus wet rice  in the Mekong.

In Thailand, a Thai-American was jailed for speaking against Royalty.

In Libya, NATO’s jet fighters rained down  2-Billion dollars worth of bombs.

God must have a sense of irony for granting rain and shine on the good and the evil.

Next time, when they celebrate water festival in Thailand, I am sure some people will have  flashbacks.

But in future Libya, those young fighters can always look back with pride, because for them, to stay alive isn’t enough. They need to become “Colonels” in their own rights. Their turn at resolving the Oedipus complex. But that’s what history is made of: old wine in new skin. I happened to spot Cher’s image on a magazine cover, right next to Kardashian’s. There is nothing new under the Sun . The water will recede in the East, and fighting subside in Mid-East.

By then, we, with our attention deficit, will have moved on. Living in Internet time and on borrowed time. Living with higher price of rice and rising price of oil.  Sand bag & Body bag.

Load-lightening with clouds

Load balancing, redundancy, follow-the-sun operation centers etc..

to be topped up by cloud.

We did that with business phones (Centrex), and mainframes.

More than a third of North American phones are now smart phones, with computational power not unlike earlier version of our desktops. When Turing and Shannon conceived a  “thinking machine”, they were just happy if it could make basic calculations.

Now, we interact with machine on such a regular basis that our language shows: down time, ramp-up time, recharge, warm up, another run at it, press reset, in the loop, boost up, and vent. (In Freedom, Franzen’s character even referred to freedom as “choosing your own apps and features”).

If there were a place for us to unload what’s in our head (let’s say to an external hard drive or upload to the cloud), we probably would, to lighten the ‘things we carried”. Over the years, we put on weight, but also stored millions of bits of information in our brains.

Random facts. Some connect. Others lay dormant but someday, will be recalled with the right stimuli.

For instance, when I read about an amputee who got thrown out of a NY amusement park ride to his death, I got a chill in the back of my head. My daughter works at a theme park.

So I would hate to hear any accident on theme park ride.

In The Greater Journey, his latest book about American in Paris, David McCullough said that what he had chosen to leave out was more important than what’s in the book.

In life, we cannot afford to “defragment” our memories i.e. to make them more compact hence more room for new facts.

Yet, even with all the “heaviness” that weight us down over the years (and it seems there were a lot of bad news lately), we barely used up a few per cents of our brain capacity.

I read about an “Afropreneur” today (a librarian’s child-turned-philanthropist who wanted to supply Africa with books and more books). I happened to be on a summer tour in W Africa with similar mission years ago. So I can once again relate to his narrative and cause.

In our open-source and open-border ecosystem, we need an open mind.

When it comes to knowledge, the more you share, the more you acquire.

Again, McCullough told Charlie Rose that in the process of researching for his book, he learned more (by plunging in).

Learning by doing. It’s a loop. Half-baked knowledge is a dangerous thing, Ivory Tower is already full of “analysts” and “thinkers”.

All the world’s knowledge, once stored in the Library of Congress now accessible to all (instead of just to congressional aides in SE D.C.). So are MIT open courses.

Load-lightening or not, we learn more if we acted more.

I did not learn from the Art of War. I learned more from my broken arm after three months of Kung Fu. Call me a wimp. But I have survived thus far. The best battle is one you don’t engage (or get drawn in). I guess, in that vein, you won’t see me strapped in one of those devilish rides any time soon. There is a fine line between foolishness and bravery. And it’s a personal call. That’s what memories do for us: to keep us alert and alive.

Cote D’Ivoire as I recall

I set foot on Cote d’Ivoire  summer 86.

Abidjan looked like former Saigon. Both were built on French architecture template.

Next door Ghanians got shinier skin. But hearing French spoken by the people there made me feel at home. In fact, so at home that I, upon discovering a Vietnamese restaurant in town, stopped in for lunch. And they did not even take our money. Fellow countrymen, in a foreign land, as far away as one could possibly imagine.

The owner mentioned about flights from France that would supply needed ingredients for egg rolls and other authentic Vietnamese dishes.

They must have been one of the very few early Asian settlers in the country.

Then, yesterday, on the Newshour, we watched Peter Pham, expert on African affairs, interviewed for the segment on current regime change in Ivory Coast.

I have seen his book on Africa‘s affairs. And to hear him on air, was just as delightful.  The word “positive deviant” came to mind.

Instead of rebelling against strict parental and cultural codes e.g. pressures to become a doctor or an engineer, some people harness their passion to pursue something totally “deviant” but with a positive spin. And Peter Pham was one of those. Vietnamese, but expert on African affairs.

A few years back, I was also surprised to see a Japanese expert on Vietnamese language.

The depth of his knowledge about our culture and language would put any of us to shame.

There certainly were some drawbacks being born outside of the culture, but this also is made up by his objectivity and relentless pursuit. In short, he went in deep.

My short stint in West Africa was my attempt to understand a culture so different from mine. To experience the world via someone else’s eyes.

In Liberia and Ghana, I relied on English to communicate. But in Cote d’Ivoire, I was forced to pull out language I acquired in my early years. Oui, oui.

I wish for the people of Cote d’Ivoire the best, when the country can be stabilized and rebuilt to its former glory.

Its boulevards and police posts were so Saigonese that I felt at home there all of a sudden. That kindred feeling that is reserved only for relatives.

Former colony, fellows of the same dreams (in French, of course). I am sure people there can recognize Alain Delon, BB and Catherine Deneuve in an instant.

That was in 86. I don’t even want to venture about its current state of internal warring. And how a hotel that turned compound for the President-in-waiting can accommodate that much aspiration for change and modernity. Any disruption, if well-capitalized, can be turned into opportunity for growth. The continent is awaiting to see if election model work out for this former French colony. All eyes are on Ivory Coast, including mine.

Beauty, yes. Beast, no.

Elizabeth Taylor and Colonel Gaddafi. What do they have in common? Nothing, except for being on the cover of People and TIME, respectively.

The Queen of Tinsel Town once played Cleopatra, while the Colonel orchestrated his self-ascendency to be King of Kings (Africa). She was surrounded by men (husbands) he women (bodyguards).

Liz hung out with the King of Pop (incidentally, Michael Jackson was wearing uniform with white gloves, like the Colonel’s) in trying to support AIDS victims, while the Colonel welcomes back the Lockerbie‘s bomber.

Both lived through high times and turmoil (she was on a wheel chair, he bullet-proof golf cart). Perhaps the only brush the Colonel had with Hollywood was when former-actor-turned-Governor-turned-President Reagan almost got him from the air. (Obama on the other hand, was wearing black-tie on his Brazilian state visit when the second air strike was ordered, straight out of Hollywood’s script). The world mourned a passing Queen, and anticipated the fading King. TIME and time never does justice to anyone on or off cover (wrinkles, extreme close-ups, ill-lighted etc..) and easily turns beauty into beast.

That said, we expect drama just stop short of King Lear‘s. Modernity had a poetic way to march into cities past and present. It did in France back in the late 19th century.

It is doing it again, also by the French. First was Egypt’s dictator & son, then next in this Africa’s top-tier nation. However long the stalemate, the end will be eminent as a thief in the night, and all the female guards in the world won’t be able to fend it off.  All depends on logistics and supplies of arms. No arms-for-hostage deal this time, please.

Maybe Beauty knows best, when it’s time to go (they call it a wrap where she came from). It’s called D-day in war-time, and expiration date at Wal-Mart.

South-South emergence

A Vietnamese film director, a Japanese novelist, a Beatles title (which I read the Vietnamese translation bought in Hanoi)= Norwegian Wood.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/norwegian-wood-film-a-labour-of-love

Indian telecom companies bought out Middle Eastern counterparts to target mobile market in Africa.

China beefs up its investment in construction and rare earth mining in S America, Australia and Africa.

These are examples of South-South trading and emerging opportunities.

BRIC by BRIC, these strategic moves will soon create a new Silk Road.

PBS and Christian Science Monitor are covering Cuba as it slowly reopened.

You saw the test scores (Math and Science from Shanghai).  Young people are asserting themselves and will go the distance, starting with online.

I am glad to see film makers encounter less barrier to entry. It started with “the Blair Witch project” and took off from there.

CNN dared to cover the first Iraq war live   Now, we get to see almost everything live via cable TV.

The rise of Pro-Ams i.e. wikipedia and wikileak.

(we forgot what’s like to see protests on the street, now that they have moved on-screen).

Like Hip Hop moves from street to stage, South-South movement will bring us  new radical ideas (such as mobile banking, low-cost car and peer-2-peer lending).

I can’t wait to see Norwegian Wood. To many who are underrepresented, having a story told on the big screen (outside of Hollywood) feels like the dragon-tatoo girl finally kicked the hornet’s nest (Sundance Festival). Remember those brick phones which once belonged only to Sunset boulevard producers (early adopters)? South-South is David’s turn at his sling shot. And this time, it started with trade and is spilling over to arts.

I heard it took a while for Haruki Murukami to agree to this mise-en-scene. Wonder who he would choose to bring 1Q84 to the big screen.